The Pink Flamingohttp://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com
Life is tacky. Deal with it!Sun, 02 Aug 2015 10:30:03 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Sunday Morning Opera: The Eternal Malehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/CSrghM5LNQM/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/08/02/sunday-morning-opera-the-eternal-male/#commentsSun, 02 Aug 2015 10:30:03 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44317...Read the Rest]]>Late one evening, I was working on a novel, and going back and forth with some guy on Twitter, about conspiracy theories. It was quite late. I’d had the Encore Western Channel on, more listening to, than watching Support Your Local Sheriff, which is, in my humble estimation, a closer portrayal to the actual personality of Wyatt Earp than any of the movies. (This is where I mention I think James Garner nailed it in Sunset.) Being too lazy to go down a flight of stairs and change the channel, I left it, not knowing what was next.

A few minutes into the movie, I hear the word ‘Doc’, then someone asks where Masterson was. It did not take long for me to realize the film was Masterson of Kansas. There were a few accurate points. Bat Masterson was sheriff of Ford County, Kansas. About a year or so before Wyatt left for Prescott, Bat and Doc Holiday were at odds, seriously at odds. They did not like one another. The only buffer between them was Wyatt Earp. Oh, and they did mange to get the story of Bat shooting Sargent King in Sweetwater. The remainder of the story was basically fiction.

We keep forgetting that fiction has a place in the creation of lore and legend, or is it lore and legend has a place in the creation of fiction? The lives of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Doc Holiday, et. al., are at the cusp of the beginning of the transformation from reality into legend. From there, eventually they become lore. Some tales, stories, or events take centuries. Others happen almost immediately, transforming the either the main character or event into a fictionalized version of reality, to make the story easier to tell.

This happened to Don Juan of Austria (1547-1578). The illegitimate son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, half-brother to Phillip II of Spain, he literally saved ‘Christendom’ from the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. In all probability, had he not died of typhoid, and had survived to command his brother’s massive armada against England a decade later, Spain would have been victorious.

Even during his life-time Don Juan of Austria was a heroic figure, handsome, dashing, and romantic, his older brother was quite jealous of him. He was also something of a womanizer. That’s the important part of the story. Yes – that Don Juan.

Fifty years after his death, Spanish monk and playwright, Tirso de Molina pens the El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest). It is a veiled treatment of the life of the young princely figure, as well as a metaphor of life and death. One hundred and fifty years later Mozart adapted and immortalized the tale into Don Giovanni.

Aside from the themes of sin, repentance, death, and damnation, the tale captures the handsome, brave, courageous, and bold male – the eternal masculine cliché, which had been reiterated time and again in literature, theater, the movies, and television. The two more recent and most successful incarnations of the same persona are the eternal males: James Bond and James T. Kirk.

Today, unless one has spent ages delving into the origin of the Don Juan legend, the relationship between the theatrical Don Juan and Don Juan of Austria is obscured. During the early years of the Tirso de Molina play, it was a given that the play was about Don Juan of Austria. It was easier hiding his story within the confines of fiction rather than risk being the main course at an auto-da-fé sponsored by the Spanish Inquisition.

Like the actual King Arthur, the real Don Juan is being lost to the mists of time. Today, very few people realize that the knight Tannhauser existed beyond the confines of a Wagnerian opera, nor his friend (in the opera), the poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, was also more than a character in an opera, with one of the most beautiful baritone arias ever written (O du, mein holder Abendstern). He wrote Parzival, based on Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, le Conte du Graal, which was based on an Arthurian legend.

This brings us back to those three names, which still leave a sense of awe: Wyatt, Bat, and Doc. Today we know their story, a real true life story…and so forth and so on. Numerous writers, scholars, historians, and researchers have and are leaving no stone unturned, trying to uncover the real story of their lives. Twenty years ago we had the leisure of knowing history would survive, intact. Today, though, it is possible that we are in a race against time, to preserve not as legend, but as fact, as much as we can, as possible.

We are rapidly losing, if not already lost, the last of those who know Wyatt Earp, in person. Having died in 1929 he is on the verge of no longer being a living memory. Perhaps even a greater cause for concern is the fact that my generation’s romance with the Wild West is no longer interesting to a generation obsessed with fake superheroes. Our world is now one of trigger warnings and scholastic censorship. If something upsets a college student, a Millennial, then their feelings need to be honored.

People like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holiday are no longer politically correct. They wore guns. They shot people. Doc Holiday came from the South, with family connections to Margaret Mitchell. Her classic, Gone With the Wind is now under fire for perpetuating the glamor of slavery and the Old South.

I was working, listening to Masterson of Kansas. Maybe it’s just me, but those names – Wyatt, Doc, Bat, Virgil, and locations like Dodge City and Hays City have a special romance. Like the popcorn crunchers of old, you want to sit down, prop up your feet, grab that popcorn, and indulge. There is almost something magical about it.

One wonders how long that magic will last. When it disappears, and the shouts of revisionism, and pontificating that things can’t possibly be true are spouted by a new generation of people who are quite well educated when it comes to math and science, but know absolutely nothing about history, that mist begins to threaten to roll in, and obscure everything we, as historians, writers, scholars, and researchers have created. Like all mists, it takes on a ghostly pall, one dimensional, and surreal.

I fear those mists are rapidly beginning to swirl. Today, all we know about King Arthur is that he pulled a sword from a stone (which he did not do) and Don Juan invited a statue to dinner and then he went to hell.

What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with the life and legend of Wyatt Earp, especially the trivial trivia about opera? Wyatt Earp loved opera. I once was able, to hold, in my own grimy little hands, a series of opera programs he once owned. Written in his own handwriting (which I know as well as my own) were notes about the performance comparing them to other performances. He had season tickets to opera in Los Angeles, and attended the opera in San Francisco. His favorite opera was La Traviata. He loved Verdi. He heard the great Enrico Caruso, live, onstage. That alone is enough to give any opera fan goose bumps.

I have been trying to find out if he and Sadie were in San Francisco on April 18, 1906. If so, he would have been at the at the Mission Opera House the night before, watching the Metropolitan Opera perform Bizet’s Carmen, starring Enrico Caruso, himself.

This is what Wyatt Earp would have heard the night of April 17, 1905. Just the thought of being able to hear the greatest tenor, ever gives me goosebumps. To comprehend that Wyatt Earp heard him, more than once, live, helps to put his life in perspective. The man was a child during the Civil War. He crossed the Santa Fe trail to California, returned back on it, to Missouri. Was literally one of the stars of the Wild and Wolly cattletown years. He was the central character in what I think was the defining moment in this nation’s history, the Gunfight at the OK Corral. He went on to be part of the Ragtime years of San Francisco, friends with the Hearst family. He went to Alaska during the gold rush, returned home and ‘retired’ the the desert outside of Parker, Arizona. During that time he took part in what is still remembered as the most controversial match in professional boxing. He was a baseball fan. He hung out in the back lots of Hollywood, paling around with the likes of Tom Mix, William S. Hart, and John Ford. According to some historians of the Silver Screen, more movies have either been made about him, featured him, or had him as a character than anyone who ever lived.

If you want to know how he walked and the tone, pitch, and the way he spoke, there was a young wrangler who worked for John Ford one summer. Both Ford and Tom Mix were Southern Cal football fans. Like I said, put these lives into perspective. We’ve gone from the Civil War to Major League Baseball and big-time college football. If the kid returned home to Iowa, both Mix and Ford knew he would never return to play football. They decided that Ford would give him a job wrangling horses. They were crazy about the kid, and let him hang out with them. According to a woman I interviewed, who was as close to Wyatt as a daughter, the kid admired Wyatt to the point where he copied the way he walked. He copied his voice, the way he spoke, enunciated words, and the tone of his voice, which I was told, was as melodious as a fog horn. The kid’s name was Marion Mitchell Morrison.

Yes, there is an opera about the Wild West. Wyatt Earp would have loved it. This is also where I interject my frequent comment about the stupidity of soprano characters. They’re always falling for the dorky and completely pathetic tenors, and rejecting our barihunks. Go figure?

I don’t like rude people or bullies. Black Lives Matter started out as a good thing. They had a reason for their movement. Then, they morphed into insufferable bores, bullies, and have harmed their movement by being so very, very rude. After the most recent harassment of a POTUS discussion between Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, they blew it. When they chose as a spokesperson, a young woman who was a convicted embezzler, to attack the two men, they blurred the thin line between protest and thuggery.

This is what one former supporter said of the group:

“...Here’s the thing. The optics are embarrassing for BLM and for Sanders and for the Democratic party as a whole. Furthermore, these tactics only serves to alienate people. Frankly, they turned me off, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Their tactics make them appear aggressive and self-centered and rude (possibly even bullying). How would BLM leaders feel, if they are discussing the deaths of black americans , someone got up and shouted incessantly about global warming though out the entire speech? Surely, global warming is an important issue. Surely, it is an urgent issue. Surely, it affects the lives of millions of not billions. Surely, it’s an issue that requires speaking truth to power. Does that make it OK to interrupt a speech by an ally on another issue, and shout all the way through the speech? I don’t think so. Everyone who thinks that BLM was right to do what it did to Sanders should be OK with this scenario…”

Then there was their ‘stare-in’ in various restaurants in NYC last winter. They are rude, their language is not what it should be, and they have no respect for anyone. They did not even have respect during an MLK Day event. Evidently their behavior is starting to annoy even the most ardent leftists and supporters of Bernie Sanders. What is rather fascinating is they are starting to eat their own, which isn’t such a bad idea.

Down Trend

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this post. I was doing it on the rude behavior of a group of obnoxious Millennials who had more time and money on their hands than they do manners. Instead, what I found is shocking. In fact, what I found is absolutely shocking.

“...We’re being told that oWe are living in an epoch different than those faced by the past people of African descent in the United States. We are neither fighting against chattel-slavery, nor are we fighting Jim Crow apartheid. Today the struggle for Black Liberation is a neocolonial struggle. Neocolonial because while Blacks are de facto colonized by US White settler-colonialism, and still de facto have a colonial relation to the US State and ruling class, it is no longer a mere legal struggle (de jure) against second class citizenship as it was under Jim Crow Apartheid. Today the struggle is far more complex than the Civil Rights Movement. While today many are wondering if we need a new Civil Rights Movement, they are failing to understand the concrete conjuncture we are living in today and are not adjusting to the new political landscape accordingly. We have already won civil rights. Blacks are no longer de jure second class citizens. Fifty years later we now have ‘civil’ Blacks: more black police officers and police chiefs, more Blacks in higher education, more Black CEOs, and ultimately a half-Black president. Yet we are still fighting a new beast, a subtle genocide.nly white supremacists are violent, evil, and racist. …”

These are very well educated and fairly privileged young people. They are also at war with certain groups of communists and anarchists who appear to be the real troublemakers. There are some very bad actors out there, very bad. There is also the beginnings of what is going to be a very nasty war among Bernie Sanders supporters. There is a very nasty war of double standards. A blog called White Agenda Report would be labeled as hate.

All lives matter. To say that it is racist to say such a thing, and that anyone who is saying it is trying to change the subject and is racist for doing just that. There’s a serious problem I see with the group who are the backbone of #BlackLivesMatter. They’re young, well-educated, very much middle class, many of them either still in college or just out of college. I suspect we can make an assumption that they are supported by their parents, are in debt up to the wazoo, and are rebelling, in part, against their parents. Raised on very important stories of the real fight for Civil Rights and desegregation I suspect some feel the need to prove themselves, rather like some Hemmingwayisk coming of age novel where the youth must go out and battle a shark, or shoot some damn lion, or what every they need to slay, metaphorically.

If it sounds like I have no respect for them, I don’t. I respect people who stand up for what they believe. I respect the process. I have no regard or consideration for spoiled, obnoxious, entitled, snotty, bullies who think the world must scrape and bow to them. They are brats.

I don’t like protests, marches, sit-ins, stare-ins, or any form of ‘protest’ which is rude, crude, and treats people who have done nothing wrong, like criminals. But, when you have a political movement which appears to be allying themselves with Greens, Anarchists, and so-called Communists who seek violent revolution, then no, I don’t like them. I don’t trust them. I think they are trouble. When I read that there are some who have sympathy for various Islamic causes, something is wrong. We are a fingernail away from what could be very bad.

Do I say this because of race? Nope, I’ve been watching and writing about white supremacists for nearly a decade. I watched the beginning of a movement, almost from its conception, back in 1998. I’ve seen something grow, from a handful of very well intentioned ranchers to borderline insurrection. I did not like what they did, and started researching and writing about it. I don’t like what I’m seeing with #BlackLivesMatter. Same song, same verse, just different vocalists in a different night club.

My honest assessment of this entire movement is that we are looking at a group of activists disparately in search of relevancy. Would someone please explain why the NAACP feels the need for a 40 day march from Alabama to DC other than to raise money, and attract attention? We evil and racist whites have been told that the so-called New Jim Crow Laws (please, where are they) are a result of Southern whites rebelling against Barack Obama.

Is it possible one of the very real problem is the left and the Dems are starting to lose control of a very important voting block, and must manipulate the situation to regain control? I know it is quite cynical of me, but it is rather fascinating the way things work.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/08/01/the-insufferable-rudeness-of-blacklivesmatter/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/08/01/the-insufferable-rudeness-of-blacklivesmatter/Why Donald Trump Should Not Be POTUShttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/DZSghRHMISk/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/31/why-donald-trump-should-not-be-potus/#commentsFri, 31 Jul 2015 10:30:28 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44319...Read the Rest]]>All joking about the absurd back-comb aside, there is one reason Donald Trump should not now, nor ever be elected President of the United States of America. It’s very simple. It is more a reflection of our modern world and culture than anything else. The man has lived a very charmed life. He has never truly known a moment of real hard-ship, deprivation, or even heart-ache that could not be softened by his money. He’s not even a ‘rich’ billionaire, no like the Brother’s Koch. He’s more like what a ‘rich’ millionaire would have been twenty-five years ago. His fortune has not grown, exceedingly, which could say quite a bit about his integrity and honesty. I think he is – for a billionaire. Yes, he has kept himself in the public eye by working hard at being Donald Trump, and has managed to do it long after many of his ilk have faded into obscurity. He’s good. He knows what he’s doing. He’s cocky, narcissistic, and has a tremendous amount of faith – in himself.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of this. The problem is, the man’s life has been so charmed, he’s never known what it is like to worry about basic survival. Yes, there were the times when he was facing bankruptcy, and could barely pay his bills, but he had the savvy to survive. That is a talent. It could be he is the dose of tonic this nation needs.

But…

On Wednesday he was doing an interview with CNN, discussing immigration. Like so many ‘reasonable’ GOP proposals, he thinks those who are here, illegally, should just go back home and they can return, as quickly as possible. That sounds nice. It sounds reasonable, and it probably is, the problem is, so many people who are here, illegally, cannot afford to return to their country of origin.

That’s the problem. When you have lived a life that does not include poverty, then someone like Donald Trump can not even begin to conceptualize how people have lived, just to survive. He showed this when he was discussing the situation in Mexico. It is sad to be so far removed from reality that, no matter how well intentioned he is, it is tragic. He will never be able to understand what these people suffer to get into this country.

He can’t.
He cannot possibly walk even an inch in their shoes.

No matter how much he can try, he can’t do it. And – that’s the main reason why he should not be POTUS.

Yet- I like the fact that he is not ruling out the option of expanding Medicare, and thinking about the Canadian system for health care. The man is a strange dichotomy. He is the first person, GOP or Dem I’ve heard who has said that no one should be without health care. The Dems play it for politics. I think this was sincere.

On the other hand Lindsey Graham has had to work for everything he has. He’s been there, where we all have gone at one time or another. He understands what it is to do without. I’d rather have Lindsey as POTUS.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/31/why-donald-trump-should-not-be-potus/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/31/why-donald-trump-should-not-be-potus/Just Who Dies in Jail?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/e6Jk-LK_cho/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/30/just-who-dies-in-jail/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 10:35:20 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44301...Read the Rest]]>According to FBI statistics, in the year 2013, there were 533,895 individuals employed in this country in law enforcement. Of these individuals, something like 49,851 were assaulted while on the job. That’s something like 10%. I like statistics in percentages because it gives us a bigger picture.

More white people commit suicide in local jails than do blacks. According to the statistics, more blacks die of heart disease in local jails than suicide or any other reason. That makes sense, considering the serious hypertension problems which apparently are genetic. While blacks have a lower rate of dying in local jails, they have a higher rate of dying while being arrested. Between 2003-2009 something like 99% of arrest related homicides were committed against blacks by cops. (There is no separate statistic for justified homicides and those which were not.)

FiveThirtyEight

The very real problem in dealing with crime statistics is that, unless you get your hands on cold-blooded statistics from the FBI, forget it. Everyone and their illegal alien (as from Mars) next door neighbor, has an opinion, which may or may not be racist. There is also a tremendous bias in discussing white on white crime and black on black crime.

Polifact

I do not want to be pictured as racist, but if you look at the population percentages, the numbers are staggering. The worst of it is, if the race based white/white, black/black is true, blacks are victimizing their own race at a horrific number. You can then understand why there is more of a discussion of about black/black crime than white/white crime. If you are black and kill someone you are more likely to be arrested an sentenced for it than if you are white. And – that is where the racism comes in, at least I think it does. The odds are greater that a black man will be shot and killed by a cop are far greater than a white man. Is it racial? Maybe. Is it possible that there are more cops patrolling dangerous neighborhoods? Maybe.

Blacks are more likely to be arrested and do hard time for a drug offense than someone who is white. They are also more likely to have greater prison sentences than their white counterpart. Black children are more likely to be tried as adults and given harsher sentences. There is endemic racism within the system, but are the wrong people being castigated as racist?

Lost in the hyperbole of #BlackLivesMatter, and the abject stupidity of the ‘New Jim Crow’ is the fact that prosecutors in this country are out of control. You show me a prosecutor with a ‘great’ record of prosecutions and convictions and I will point to someone like Nancy Grace. The system is rife with prosecutorial misconduct to the point where it is terrifying. It’s hard enough for whites, but if you are black, just go ahead and walk straight to prison.

The real racism is when prosecutors refuse to go after bad cops. They could, but they won’t. They need that law and order image to be re-elected. If the same people who are promoting #BlackLivesMatter would attack the real problem, out of control prosecutors who are blatantly racist and playing to there white base. That white base votes. They are politicians who are using the office as a stepping stone to bigger and better offices. Nothing is going to change until these people are forced to do what is right and honorable.

It is racist. It is also about the fact that the average black man who is arrested for drugs can’t afford a lawyer. It is about politics and pandering to be tough on crime. It is racist, and yet it isn’t. It is worse than racism. It is about a group of men and women who are using race to further their careers. I think that’s even worse.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/30/just-who-dies-in-jail/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/30/just-who-dies-in-jail/Oliver Cromwell Is Deadhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/GOGOmfYtYhc/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/29/oliver-cromwell-is-dead/#commentsWed, 29 Jul 2015 10:35:40 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44310...Read the Rest]]>Oliver Cromwell is buried and deadHe hi, buried and deadThey planted an apple tree over his headHe hi over his head

The apples were ripe and ready to fallHe hi ready to fallThere came an old woman to gather them allHe hi gather them all

It should be noted that I find the photo of one of the statues of Oliver Cromwell to be hideously distasteful and deplorable. No one in this country can possibly loath a statue of Nathan Bedford Forest or the Confederate flag, any more than I do this image of Oliver Cromwell. To me, and to millions of people in the UK, this is the single worst individual who ever lived, after Judas Iscariot. Yes, he was that vile. More members of my family met their demise via Cromwell than any other single individual in history. It is a shame our wretchedly ignorant population here in the US knows nothing about Cromwell or what he did, or they would understand the evil he created.

“…Objects are a part of the study of human history because they provide a concrete basis for ideas, and can validate them. Their preservation demonstrates a recognition of the necessity of the past and of the things that tell its story…What one generation considers “cultural heritage” may be rejected by the next generation, only to be revived by a subsequent generation….”

I have a friend who is in London today, doing the tourist thing. My request. If she is wanted to do something for me, when she was in Westminster Abbey, she would stomp all over Oliver Cromwell’s head. His head is buried in the floor, with a stone marker, going into the Tudor and Stuart section. In order to pay homage to QEI, you must literally walk all over him. I stomped on him.

It dawned on me how much more creative and cold-blooded the Brits are/were about these things. Richard III was basically buried where he fell, and there he lay, until last year. We could learn a lot from them. They don’t go digging up the buried, unless they are in the middle of a car park. They don’t destroy their statues. They understand that history is history and has nothing to do with anything but history. To assign emotional hatred to say a statue of some Southern general is irrational.

Defenders of the Confederate flag talk about heritage, which is something of a joke. They are referring to Cultural Heritage – and – they are correct.

“…Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations. Cultural heritage includes tangible culture (such as buildings, monuments, landscapes, books, works of art, and artifacts), intangible culture (such as folklore, traditions, language, and knowledge), and natural heritage (including culturally significant landscapes, and biodiversity).

The deliberate act of keeping cultural heritage from the present for the future is known as preservation (American English) or conservation (British English), though these terms may have more specific or technical meaning in the same contexts in the other dialect…”

It is the recognition that, no matter how vile he was the statues and burial of Oliver Cromwell, as well as Nathan Bedford Forest are important. They provide a valuable lesson to history. The preservation of these items is not a recognition of their holiness, but the fact that they are history, and as history, have an intrinsic value all their own.

The battle to preserve such items is not an endorsement of the person, idea, or anything about that individual person, but it is an acknowledgement that history is more important than the mercurial and often destructive whims of a frenzied mob. The destruction of cultural artifacts such as statues or even the call for the removal of Stone Mountain is the act of an uneducated mind with a specific agenda. Only rancid ideologies such as ISIS or the Taliban destroy history, archeological, artistic, and cultural monuments. If those calling for the removal of such artifacts are insulted by the label, then perhaps they should consider their motives. They may think their motives are for the greater good – but they are simply destructive and set a horrible precedent.

Like Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan cronies, the Confederacy is dead. Cromwell lost. The South lost. While I would like nothing more than defiling what is left of his miserable bones, I trust his soul is rotting in hell. It’s over.

Those who are ignorant when it comes to history, like to wax poetic about the horrors of the Civil War, the death and destruction, blaming it all on the South. The population of the United States at the time was approximately 31.5 million. During the Civil War, the total death count, civilians and military rang anywhere from 625,000 to 850,000. The British Civil War took place from 1644-6152. At the time, the population of England was approximately 5.1 million. The death toll from Cromwell’s monstrosity, both military and civilian was about 175,000. If you look at it like we’re talking a quarter of the deaths during the American Civil War, then reduce the population of the US to 7.8 million and factor in the loss of 175,000 people, and you can see how it devastated nation.

Even with a brutal war that saw a major segment of the population destroyed, the British people did not topple the statues of Cromwell. They may have literally pissed on them and did a few other things, but that was about it. Those who are demanding the removal of statues, graves, and memorials of things that bother them, need to realize you don’t go around putting a trigger warning on life. Right now we are dealing with the extended adolescence of Millennials who don’t quite understand that life is not regulated by helmets, feeling good, pablum, and those ever present trigger warnings. Just because something disturbs them, it should not be eliminated. Like the fools they are proving themselves to be, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/29/oliver-cromwell-is-dead/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/29/oliver-cromwell-is-dead/Murderous Eyeshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/MtqaV2Nxq_0/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/28/murderous-eyes/#commentsTue, 28 Jul 2015 10:32:13 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44247...Read the Rest]]>When James Holmes sister visited him in prison, the first thing she noticed was how his eyes had changed. They were bulging.

Have you ever noticed how many evil people have the same look in their eyes? There is something that reflects in them. They says that a person’s eyes are a doorway to their soul. If so, these people are horrid, pure dripping evil. Then, some of them may be victims of life. Many have a connection between mental illness and anti-depressants.

I worked on the post for several hours. After awhile, it became very difficult to look upon the face of horrible evil. To off-set, I’ve added a few pallet cleansers, men and women who reflect goodness and humanity. Seriously, I worked for so long, I could not go back and add additional photographs after a certain amount of time. When you look at these individuals, for an amount of time, it is chilling. And – no, I did not add the worst of them. There were some entities I swear are nothing but pure, dripping evil. The only reason I don’t have many women is because photos are more difficult to find – properly identified.

When you keep staring at the faces of pure evil, I swear, there is something almost demonic, supernatural in their evil. If a person’s face can reflect heaven, then others can reflect hell. I had been noticing the eyes of those who have been involved in the latest atrocities, and have remarked to others how similar they are. The only way to understand what I’m noticing, is to start comparing. I’m presenting only the eye area, with the names of the person.

Mohammod Abdulazeez

Dylann Roof

Dylaan Roof

Ata-se Giffa

Black Elk

Pope Francis

Bradley Stone

Adam Lanza

Ebony Wilkerson

Adolf Hitler

C. S. Lewis

Andrea Yates

Jeff Weise

Ivan Lopez

Aaron Alexis

Maj. Nidal Hasan

Alan Oliver Frazier

Anders Breivik

James Holmes

Jared Lee Loughner

Jose Reyes

Steven Kazmierczak

Corrie ten Boom

Cho Seung-Hui

Kip Kinkel

Jacon Tyler Roberts

Jason Hoffman

Dylan Klebold

Eric Harris

Ted Bundy

Ethel Waters

Osama bin Laden

Richard Ramirez

Gregory Wagner

Aileen Wuornos

Pearl Buck

Charles Manson

Ayn Rand

Dennis Rader

There are many more of these monsters. I could not handle looking at them, any longer. I had to quit. There is a difference between the face of good and of evil. There is something in the face of a goodly man. There is a shocking difference between the faces of good and evil.

Booker T. Washington

And then…there is the face of a saint.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/28/murderous-eyes/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/28/murderous-eyes/Deleting Thomas Jefferson – Racist & Slave Ownerhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/WRJPzuwgzbw/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/27/deleting-thomas-jefferson-racist-slave-owner/#commentsMon, 27 Jul 2015 10:39:35 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44232...Read the Rest]]>Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, agonizing and arguing about slavery, trying to end it, has now been rejected as politically incorrect by The Connecticut Democratic Party ended all ties to Thomas Jefferson, for being a racist slave owner, and Andrew Jackson for his mistreatment of Native Americans. One wonders if state party chair, Nick Balletto is encouraging the state to reject references to the two former presidents on United States’ currency. You see, Thomas Jefferson was an evil slave owner. Never mind that he wrote the following:

“…he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another…”

I am not a fan of Thomas Jefferson. But – it is not because of the slavery clause which was removed, in order to get the slavery clause removed, Jefferson bowed to pressure. I’ve long felt that Jefferson was a horror. He was not a nice person. He wanted to end black slavery because he did not like Africans, thought they were inferior, and did not have the same intellect as their white counterparts.

John Godby was my great-grandfather’s great grandfather. He realized as a Christian he could not own another human. According to our family stories, from a copy of a letter I have – somewhere, and please don’t ask where, because I have no earthly idea, he described the process of freeing them. He taught them how to read. He gave them his property, and left with almost nothing, always being impoverished the rest of his life – but did what was right.

“…John Godbey was born in 1752, and was a Revolutionary Soldier. One record states that he was born at Godbey’s Bluff, New River, Pulaski Co., Va. (now W.Va.) or in Caroline Co., Va. That record states that he died in 1803, and lived in New Revier, Va., until he went to Green Briar Co., Va. He inherited a strong Quaker tradition from the third Thomas Godbey (above), received his share of an estate in slaves, but was converted to Methodism by the preaching of Thomas Asbury, and immediately manumitted his slaves, providing for them according to the laws of Virginia (this is confirmed by the personal property tax list of Caroline Co. for 1783 which shows that he had no slaves, two horses and two oxen being his only taxable property). None of his descendants ever held slaves though living in slave owning sates. Four of his grandchildren became Methodist ministers. He moved to W. Va. in 1784. His son, …”

I don’t like Jefferson. I think he was almost a sociopath. He was cold-blooded and had no feeling when it came to compassion and people. He was so arrogant the Bible did not apply to him, so he wrote his own version. Even worse, Jefferson inspired the Reign of Terror. It wasn’t until Adams basically pushed him into a diplomatic corner that he even acknowledged it. He never condemned the slaughter of nearly 45,000 people, the way John Adams did.

He was a horror, but, redeemed for having the vision to offer Napoleon three million bucks for a parcel of land, then have the guts to send a scientific and exploratory team to do just that. He was the brains behind the US Marines, and was the person who ended nearly a thousand years of Islamic slave trade in the Mediterranean. I guess though, ending the Mediterranean slave trade didn’t matter. If you get right down to it, the ending of the slave trade, out of Tripoli, is what started the beginning of the end of slave trade in the US.

Also, the way Jefferson is presented, today, he is made to look like he did nothing but prey on his female slaves. There’s a problem with that. When his young wife died, he promised he would never remarry. He never promised not to fool around, and have mistresses. He had one affair after another – with married women of his social class.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/27/deleting-thomas-jefferson-racist-slave-owner/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/27/deleting-thomas-jefferson-racist-slave-owner/Sunday Morning Opera: Update on Our Favorite Barihinkhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/CkSacWzdSI8/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/26/sunday-morning-opera-update-on-our-favorite-barihink/#commentsSun, 26 Jul 2015 10:22:04 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44223...Read the Rest]]>NOTE: I am not going to delve into the information I found about our favorite Barihunk’s health. Apparently, he is doing well, and responding quite well to treatment. He has chosen to keep things private. I’m not going to violate that privacy other than to present links to an article I discovered. According to the article, they caught the tumor early. That’s good. My prayers have been that he would come to this country. Evidently he did, for diagnostic work, and maybe even a treatment plan. Even if the Royal Marsden is listed as one of the top cancer hospitals in the world, but I think we have several here, which are better. I think, right here in ABQ, the cure to many brain related cancers has already been discovered, and is now going to the FDA for approval.

The other day I found an article, out of Russia, an interview with Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s parents. I’m linking to the Russian version. I used Microsoft translator. I don’t use Google Chrome. I’m told it is an easy translation. This is the translation I used. The link opened, again, for me.

He stays in our prayers.

For anyone who has had to deal with melanoma, like I have, the knowledge there is now a treatment that is basically a cure for the late stage of the disease is exciting, and possibly life-saving. I’ve lived with the specter of the disease since 1997.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/26/sunday-morning-opera-update-on-our-favorite-barihink/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/26/sunday-morning-opera-update-on-our-favorite-barihink/The Evil That Men Dohttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/e-hKCxdSPqo/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/25/the-evil-that-men-do/#commentsSat, 25 Jul 2015 10:37:32 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44235...Read the Rest]]>Why can’t people just shut-up already yet about yet another ‘far right’ mass murderer? John Russell Houser was far right. Okay? So what? The left jumped on the far right, blaming them for this man’s insanity, instead of showing any rational form of reason. The dirty little facts are that on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Domestic Terrorists all are either gang related or far left. No one from the far right is on it. Many are eco-terrorists.

Unabomber – Anarchist

Ft. Hood shooter – Registered Democrat

Columbine shooters – Both families were registered Democrats

Virginia Tech shooter – Registered Democrat

Colorado Theater shooter – Registered Democrat

Connecticut School Shooter – Registered Democrat

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ shooter – Registered Democrat

Mother Jones has a very good guide to mass shootings in the US. We’re dealing with one very nasty problem here. It has nothing to do with political proclivities and everything to do with those who are seriously mentally ill – criminally mentally ill. Something like 7.5% of crime is committed by those with serious mental illness. Substance abuse makes it worse, of course. Studies have shown it is cheaper to treat the mentally ill, before they commit a crime, than afterward, when dealing with incarceration, trials, and investigations. Of those who commit crimes:

3% – serious depression

4% schizophrenia

10% bi-polar

The real problem with our culture is not as simple gun control. Someone who is unhinged and yet knows the difference from right and wrong, but doesn’t care, and truly wants to commit murder, will find a way to do it. Unfortunately, due to the horrible way people have been treated in the past, those who are dangerously mentally ill are allowed ‘freedom’ and their ‘rights’, regardless of who they destroy, starting with their families. There needs to be a way to be able to confine these individuals, in a decent setting which is not a prison, for their own good. If not, we’re going to be seeing more of these horrific incidents.

It’s too bad partisan politics must be interjected into what is a serious societal problem. You can’t solve anything by accusing the right or the left of facilitating a crime, simply because of ideology. Until we decide that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and do something about it, expect more mass murder. The right doesn’t want to reign in gun sales and the left does not want to reign in unbridled ‘freedom’ for everyone, even those who would harm others.

Nothing is going to change.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/25/the-evil-that-men-do/feed/2http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/25/the-evil-that-men-do/Sandra Bland Was Cutting Herselfhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/qOtqetVmeWM/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/24/sandra-bland-was-cutting-herself/#commentsFri, 24 Jul 2015 10:36:44 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44225...Read the Rest]]>Sandra Bland was cutting herself. The reason a person cuts themselves is to create control in their lives. She was on her way to establishing that control, and her dream job. Then, her life fell apart. In an era of zero tolerance, she had been pushed to the breaking point.

Of all the recent news stories, I think this one has upset the most. Sandra Bland is dead. The question is was her death a suicide or something more nefarious? The arresting officer was a total and complete jerk. That’s what the dash-cam video shows. But, what we’re not told is that he ran her license and registration. Unfortunately, what we’ve not been told is what he found. She had something like 10 encounters with cops in Illinois and in Texas. I don’t know about you, but that’s quite a few.

What disturbs me is the report that the autopsy said she either swallowed a tremendous amount of marijuana in jail or smoked it. How the hell did she get it? Maybe that is a greater question than the suicide.

March, 2013 – She was stopped while driving a 2013 Cadillac DeVille. She was fined for speeding and driving an uninsured vehicle. According to Cook County records, the $200 fine has yet to be paid.

November, 2013 – She was arrested in Naperville and charged, transported to DuPage County Jail.

February, 2014 – Bland was charged, convicted and fined for driving an uninsured vehicle and driving with an expired license. As of May, 2014 she had not paid the fine of $2,769.00.

March 3, 2014 – Another operating an uninsured vehicle. As of June, of 2014 she had yet to pay $1,313.00.

March 8, 2014 – She was stopped in Lombard, for speeding, driving under the influence, improper lane change, failure to obey a traffic signale, failed to signal lane changed, driving with a suspended license, operating an uninsured vehicle. She was convicted of 1 count of DUI. The fine was $3,132.00. She lost her license until November of 2104.

“…In the days before she was jailed, Mosley said, there were no red flags that she suffered from mental illness or even mild depression. Suggestions to the contrary, based on an earlier video in which she said that she had suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, were “absurd,” he said.

“She was talking about this job, waiting on this callback,” Reed-Veal, who is a real estate broker, said of her daughter’s interview for a job as a college outreach coordinator at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, a historically black university.

“I know what my purpose is,” she recalled Bland saying. “My purpose is to go back to Texas and stop all social injustice in the South.”..”

Racism? The child was out-of-control with what appears to be a fairly serious drug problem, enough for there to have a DUI. Apparently the family could afford to get her help, but it would appear that they did not. Every one is so busy screaming racism, no one is bothering to look at a tragic young woman who had a substance abuse problem, and appears to have been ‘gotten out of’ disasters of her own making. I’m wondering if the family was practicing a little ‘tough love’ on her, and decided to let her sit in jail for a few days. She was cutting herself – and the family said she had no problems? That is a cry for help. I don’t care what her race was, she deserved better – from her family, from what I can tell.

I have known kids like this. I also know what their families have gone through, trying to keep them out of trouble. For the family to say they knew of no problems, they were either lying or had no contact with her. The problems go back a good 10 years. She was cutting herself! Do you know why people her age do that? It is a cry for help.

Healthy Place

Racism? Frankly, I don’t know why, with the traffic infractions she had, why she was not doing either community service, rehab, or some jail time. And yes – I know of white kids who have had similar problems – and they did all of the above.

I’m so sick of this fake crying about racism. It’s not helping this young woman. She needed very real psychological help. From what I’m reading, I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t bi-polar. She needed help she was not getting. And – obviously no one gave a damn about it. I think about the young people I know who are her age, and have had problems. Their families have gone to hell and back to help them. Evidently, now that she’s dead, everyone is wringing their hands and blaming others. This whole story makes me ill.

As for suicide, I suspect that is exactly what happened. Anyone who was cutting themselves was at risk. Did her mother not know about it? I know someone who went through the same thing with a child, including jail time. How she handled things was far different from what we see here. It is so much easier to scream racism than look in a mirror and take blame.

This is not a simple tale. To scream and yell racism is helping no one. I don’t know if the arrest was racist. What I do know is, now that we are aware of the young woman’s 10 year history of traffic violations and arrest records, I can understand the cop’s attitude. But – he violated so many rules, including not calling for help. I’m wondering if we can assume that he smelled marijuana in the car? We’re not talking Colorado. Bland was combative. It is fascinating how her traffic violations are bunched together. This could so easily be explained if she were bi-polar. If so, did her family not know? If they knew, why are they lying about it? If they did not know, then that’s just as bad.

The young woman left a trail of tears on FB. She was despondent. She’d lost a baby, and obviously had a problem with it. I’m wondering if the traffic violations happened after the miscarriage. If so, didn’t her family give a damn? Was she targeted for her activism? Frankly I don’t think the arresting officer was that bright.

I was listening to a psychologist on CNN, who obviously had only superficial facts. I think Sandra Bland was a spoiled, rich brat, who was also a pot-head. Where is the 2013 Cadillac she was driving a year ago? Did her mother decide to let her spend the weekend in jail for tough love, and Sandra decided to stage a suicide attempt, which was, unfortunately successful?

The psychologist on CNN said there was no reason for a young woman who had just landed her dream job to be upset. Her tears and anxiety were that she wanted her future, not about suicide. Yes, the woman was that stupid.

A young woman with a history of marijuana abuse, DUI, traffic tickets, and one arrest warrant is arrested and spends the weekend in jail, for assaulting a cop. Bye bye job. She hadn’t had her first day on the job. She probably would have been on probation. Probation would allow no quarter for what had just happened to her. Add to the fact that, for once, she hadn’t done anything all that wrong, and she had been put in a position where not only was her dream job history, but she would have faced a bleak employment picture. The cutting is indicative of someone who feels she has no control of her life.

If you can’t cry for this woman, you don’t have a heart. Her life was so tragic. Let’s be honest. She sewed the seeds of her own destruction. I’ve seen so many Sandra Blands in my lifetime, I just keep hoping the insanity will end, but it never does. I don’t know if the actions of a really bad cop were racist. They were uncalled for. It destroyed the life of a young woman who had so much promise.

But…

What if she had been wise enough to say please and thank you and not lip off to him? She would still be alive. A friend once told me that I need to stay home until I can learn to keep my big fat mouth shut. It was the best advice anyone has ever given me. There are times when you just need to keep your big fat mouth shut – and live to fight another day.

I have been saying that one of these days, the-little -boy-who-cried-wolf hyperventilating about racism was going to cause people to miss the real story. Yes, this is about racism. But, it is more than racism. In a way, racism diminishes the story and the tragedy. The tragedy was, the moment an over-zealous cop who had no business being a cop turned a routine traffic stop, that was a judgement call in the first place, into an assault on an officer, he had literally ruined Sandra Bland’s immediate future. We live in an era of zero tolerance. A young woman, who was due to start her job in a few days, knew that, because of abject insanity, she would not have that job the moment her immediate supervisor discovered where she had spent her weekend. At her age, try putting something like that on a resume and hope to get a well-paying, viable job with a future. She would be lucky to be able to flip burgers at Mickey D’s. Considering the fact that she probably could not pass a pee-test, she couldn’t even find minimum wage employment at Walmart.

The real racism is the fact that, due to the atrocious incarceration of blacks, once out of jail, and home, free, they aren’t. Their lives have been ruined. We live in a society which refuses to forgive. It’s zero tolerance, all the way.

Why the hell didn’t Sandra Bland demand to see an attorney?

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/24/sandra-bland-was-cutting-herself/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/24/sandra-bland-was-cutting-herself/Trump vs. Grahamhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/2dYlJiH54YM/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/23/trump-vs-graham/#commentsThu, 23 Jul 2015 10:31:05 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44213...Read the Rest]]>There is a very good reason Donald Trump attacked Lindsey, on Tuesday, in South Carolina. There are several very good reasons he did. Amazingly, the pontificating media and punditry have no earthly idea why Trump did, what he did, when he did, and where he did. First, he was in a part of South Carolina where Lindsey’s support is the shakiest. Secondly, the people who are supporting Trump despise both John McCain and Lindsey. He was preaching to the audience. What he did was coldly calculated. Don’t ever think it was ‘off the cuff’. It wasn’t.

It was designed to get the most attention from the media and suck all the air out of the room. It was designed to pander to the former Ron Paul bots and a very specific libertarian crowd not only in SC, but around the country. It was designed to suck the life out of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and perhaps even Scott Walker.

Trump is playing to the libertarian, tea party base. He’s not playing to the religious base, but the tea party base. For a long time, we’ve thought they were separate but equal. Don’t ever think his campaign is a joke or, as I suspect, his numbers will not take a dip. Someone has done some remarkable marketing research. I don’t like it, but I’m impressed. He’s about a crazy as Ulysses was when he harnessed himself to a plow and pretended he was a ox to get out of going to Troy to rescue fair Helen. To make further use of the metaphor, Trump is the GOP’s Trojan Horse.

Right now, Trump is making a play for the libertarian, anti-immigration, racist, bigoted, anti-Hispanic crowd. They were once the libertarian fringe, but now they’ve basically taken over the GOP. When you start factoring in Scott Walker and his libertarian prostitution to the Brother’s Koch, along with Rand Paul, you understand why Republicans like moi no longer fit in the GOP.

Polling, right now, is crap. I’m looking at the internals of the latest WPost poll, and the wrong questions are being asked. The questions are broken down by registered voters and general population not party preference. These numbers mean absolutely nothing. We’re looking at party primaries not a general election, yet the questions are asked almost like a general election. The numbers are almost designed to prove nothing.

What we do know according to previous years, whoever is on top today, will probably be on the bottom a year from now. No, Trump won’t be the nominee. Neither will Sanders. Both are playing the clown-card ‘comic’ relief, to divert attention from he/she who will be the nominee. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s better for them to stay in the background right now, and let the eventual losers shoot themselves in their feet, one toe at a time.

We don’t know who the GOP nominee is going to be. It won’t be Trump. I doubt very seriously if it will be Cruz, Paul, Huckabee, Carson, Walker, or Christie. We can eliminate Jindal, Santorum, and maybe even Rubio. Frankly, I think Lindsey has a better chance getting the nomination than Trump.

What I fear is, if Trump has done his marketing research, the GOP base is now libertarian. Those of us who are traditional Republicans are no longer needed nor wanted. I’m certainly not comfortable as a Democrat. I wish we had a real option, and the lousy libertarians would crawl back up under the floorboard like the filthy roaches they are, and quit lying about who and what they are. But, libertarians are basically dishonest, so don’t expect anything else out of them.

If we still had a normal Republican Party, any candidate who trashed a war hero like John McCain would be slithering back to hell, where they belong. Had a true GOP candidate done what Trump did to Lindsey today, they would have been forced to atone for their sins. Right now, the only ‘real’ Republicans we have running are Lindsey, Jeb, John Kasich, and Rick Perry. The rest are pretenders.

If you check out the far right on Twitter, they are applauding what Trump did to Lindsey today. It makes sense, they’ve always hate Lindsey. If you want my personal opinion, that’s one of the best endorsements a person can receive, being hated by the far right, libertarian, tea party types. Right now, I’ seething. I guess that’s why I didn’t want Lindsey running in the first place. He’s too good for this shit. My father always called it casting pearls before the swine. I think that explains Trump, perfectly – swine.

If all else fails, make fun of the Donald. His ego is so great, he can’t stand ridicule.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/23/trump-vs-graham/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/23/trump-vs-graham/A Tale of Two Monstershttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/RK1pkwqe9Tw/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/22/a-tale-of-two-monsters/#commentsWed, 22 Jul 2015 10:18:14 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44208...Read the Rest]]>Two young men, both of them growing up with all the advantages of being a young man in modern America have, between them, slaughtered a total of 14 men and women. They were good, honorable, and decent men and women who did not deserve their fate. Unfortunately, the actions of these two monsters have become cultural and political Rorschach tests. Instead of bringing out the best in us all, various factions are doing just the opposite. There is a very good reason for this. We’re getting two different narratives for what should be the same tale, just different chapters and verses.

Dylann Root grew up with a lower middle class family, who apparently indulged him. Socially stunted, then dumped by the love of his life, for a black man (allegedly), he turned to drugs, suffered from mental illness, degenerated into far right extremism. He left a paper trail of writing about his extremism, went to the gun range, then he murdered nine people.

Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez was a naturalized American. He did well in school, athletics, then was fired from his first major job. He began experimenting with drugs. He suffered from depression. His family sent him back to the old country where he became indoctrinated with religious extremism. He came home, began writing about his extremism, went to the gun range, then murdered five people.

They were both seriously disturbed, and acted out in hate. People can be involved in ‘hate’ groups and not kill. What both young men did requires serious mental illness, but that mental illness does not result in diminished capacity. They knew what they were doing. They knew what they were doing would destroy lives and would destroy their families. By the time they started killing people, all they could do was let hate wash over – both of them.

This is where the resemblance ends. Instead of trying to understand what made Dylann Root tick, the moment it was discovered he had delved into the worst kind of hate, the situation was used to damn an entire part of the country. It was immediately used and manipulated for a political agenda. There was no attempt to treat Root’s family with dignity or consideration. Why bother. He was a white supremacist. His family created a monster. Why even bother trying to explain his mental illness and what caused the breakdown. He was a product of South Carolina, which, because of slavery 150 years previous, he murdered 9 people. His victims are memorialized, and treated like martyrs to a cause. What Root did is being used to damn an entire part of the country, erase history, and allow for wholesale politically correct censoring.

Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez’s family is being treated with the utmost respect. The poor young man was suffering from depression. That’s why he did what he did. His mental illness, not the hateful indoctrination of a monstrous perversion of a great religion, caused him to do what he did. It is almost as if the media is trying to find an excuse for what he did, rather than admit that his actions were identical to Root, a hate crime. If you dare mention they are the same, you are damned for it.

The real problem here is two-fold. First, if one admits that the storyline is basically the same, then an entire political segment must be required to admit they blew it. They went over-board with their damnation of the entire South, and they are the ones who degenerated into pure, abject bigotry and hate. Unable to see beyond their own bias, they were incapable of any sort of compassion for the man’s family. They still aren’t. They are so determined to maintain their politically correct narrative of white supremacists kill more people than Islamic terror does, that they must turn themselves into pretzels, in order to prove a point. In order to maintain the hysteria, they are making fools of themselves, turning righteous indignation into what is starting to look like wholesale censorship and cultural cleansing.

If these same people admit that what Abdulazeez did was a hate crime, then the politically correct narrative that Islam is not a religion of extremes and hate comes tumbling down, like Humpty-Dumpty. For years there has been this narrative that only the extreme right is a domestic terror danger, when that is far from the truth. In fact, if you check the FBI’s most wanted for domestic terror, every single person on it is far left. The Administration has turned the far right into such monsters of near mythological proportion that, in order to maintain their narrative, if Abdulazeez is recognized as having committed a hate crime based on a corruption of Islam, then they fear far right, white supremacist haters wills start killing Muslims. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Like I said, this is a cultural and political Rorschach test. One group of us see what both men did as an expression of evil. Another group sees it as a political tool to further a cause. There’s nothing wrong with politics. But, I detest intellectual dishonest, and we’re been treated to it, in major league proportions.

This country has a far greater problem with radicalized Islamic terror than we do far right idiots. There is one reason the numbers don’t show how bad the situation actually is. The FBI has done a magnificent job arresting people before they turn to slaughter.

These stupid idiots are a far greater danger to themselves than to others. The problem is, the situation has now become so insane, no one wants to put anything into perspective. No one is bothering to apply a little bit of psychology or understanding of human nature. The main reason people like this should not have guns is because they would end up shooting themselves by accident.

There are some very bad extremists in this country. Associated via Stormfront, there are skinheads, and violent neo-Nazis. The big mistake is the failure to understand that idiots like the above, and Confederate sympathizers are killers. They are not. Neither are normal Muslims.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/22/a-tale-of-two-monsters/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/22/a-tale-of-two-monsters/Minimizing Hatehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/ZMHsoQX3NJ8/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/21/minimizing-hate/#commentsTue, 21 Jul 2015 10:30:08 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44193...Read the Rest]]>I have been writing about and researching hate groups in this country for nearly 10 years. It will be 10 years in October that I started working on it. One of the reasons I started blogging is because of what I was starting to see. I won’t give the reasons or the story. Not long after I started writing about it, I was on the phone with my late editor. I was telling him what I was finding, shocked. He explained that his uncle was one of the big-time Nazi hunters. Jewish, his uncle had once engaged in a shootout in a London subway with a Nazi. Mark told me what to look for, and how to find them. An hour later I was physically ill. I could not believe what I had found, right there, for the world to see. He advised me to start printing what I was finding. I did. I have 4 liner feet of print-outs and pages from 10 years ago – small sites, which are now gone, the people involved in them going on to bigger and better things.

If you have been following me on Twitter, or in comments I’ve been making this past month, you know I’m irate, disappointed, and disgusted with what I see. I don’t mind expressing my abject dismay with the SPLC over what has happened since the Charleston shooting. They’re blowing it. I think they blew it before that, quite truthfully, by calling too many groups ‘hate’. Yes, there are groups which hate, but it needs to be defined. There’s a difference between ‘hate’ and ‘hate‘.

The mistake the SPLC has made, along with I think, the Obama Administration, and quite a few on the left, is simplistically lumping all of these groups together, not dealing with nuances, degrees and stark reality. They are also ignoring psychology. Instead of minimizing the problem, they’ve made it much worse than it one was. At the same time, there is a concerted effort to completely ignore the threat of Islamic religious hate, concentrating only on those who are against Islam, ignoring the growing threat here in this country. By euphemistically calling it ‘domestic’ terror, and ignoring the number of arrests being made before attacks happen, there is an intellectual dishonesty at work. The threat to this nation from Islamic hate is far greater than from far right hate. Frankly, I think some of the posturing is purely political. And – that is not a good thing. In fact, it is a very bad thing. Not only has it enraged a specific group of people who were far from angry about anything, and blinded another group to the real threat.

Quite frankly, I’m furious with the abject intellectual dishonesty, and what I fear can only be called ‘race-baiting’. I’ve been watching ‘racism’ and hate long enough to know what is honest, and what is dishonest. What we are seeing today, with the ire, and fury over what happened in Charleston is fake. It’s political. It is manipulative and being used to serve a political purpose. It is abjectly dishonest and very poorly done.

There are many explanations for what is happening. Unfortunately, I am now so cynical I think the outrage is being orchestrated in an attempt to marginalize the growing political clout of the southern part of the United States. I suspect the idea is to attempt to make inroads in southern states, trying to convince them the GOP is racist and cannot be trusted. I hope that is all this is. After the response to what happened in Chattanooga, I do think that is what we’re dealing with – political operatives trying to rile up a constituency who is extremely disillusioned with politics, and may not be turning out in the numbers they want – for 2016. Considering the fact that the Administration has no problem arming and supporting fascists and Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine, I have a very difficult time even thinking they give a damn about the same people in this country. It’s quite obvious there are certain libertarian factions in this country who have no problem with either group.

That is my cynical version of things. We are also dealing with a group of far left extremists who are as ill-informed and illiterate as their far right counterparts. Like far left tea partiers (insult intended) they are doing what they are told, saying what they are told to say, and harassing who they are told to harass. They are just a ignorant as to how the government works, the Constitution, and the basics of civics that I am about ready to agree with a friend who says they are the same people, hiring out to the highest bidder, for pay. If so, then we go right back to the mechanization of Karl Rove and the Brother’s Koch. We must enrage the base, the tea party base, which has been terribly quiet, basically dying. Unfortunately, we all know the extreme right, those lovely little entities who march around holding Confederate flags, hating immigrants and saying bad things about people of color are the same base which is now enraged, and protesting, thusly.

Over the weekend, in Charleston, there was a glorious rally of KKKers who came in from several states, to rally ’round the flag, boys, rally ’round the flag. They showed up, by the handful, in all their glory. I found a tweet that said it best.

Twitter Screen Capture

That’s it. We need perspective on what is going on with these idiots – and they are idiots. I suspect they should not be allowed to reproduce, considering their dubious gene pool. Like I mentioned to someone, those of us in the South make fun of these people. I think you can see why. They are worthy of being mocked. They are a joke. In the state of South Carolina there are two active KKK groups. The largest group has about 65 members or so. The state of South Carolina has a population of over 4.8 million people. The state has something like 19 ‘hate’ groups. Of those, 1 is anti-immigration, and another is anti-LGBT. There are six ‘Confederate patriot’ groups. While membership will overlap, the groups you fear are about 8, which are associated with Neo-Nazis, skinheads, and CofCC.

The real problem here is perspective. This where the SPLC has gone wrong, lumping everyone together. You can’t. They are different. The people one should fear are those who have an association with Stormfront, skinheads, Sovereign Citizens (not race based), and anything which is part of the Council of Conservative Citizens, American Renaissance, Vdare, Stormfront group. The Sovereign Citizens may be even scarier than the Neo-Nazis. They’re the ones who don’t mind a fighting war. Cliven Bundy is part of the fringe of their movement.

So many things are going on here. First, the libertarian, extreme right movement chose South Carolina to be their secession model. Another faction of the same ‘bunch’ is using Oklahoma as a model for a religious take-over. They’ve made North Carolina ground zero in voting rights. They’re using New Mexico as an example of abject political corruption and the wholesale purchase of a state. Their chosen disciples, this year, are Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie. Unfortunately, that’s where the Ukraine comes in, for the oil, gas, and agri-business.

The far left has turned ‘racism’ into a joke. If I weren’t a rational and well-grounded individual, I’d swear they were using it for cultural cleansing. There is a hatred against white people being spewed that is almost frightening. There is an entire generation of young people who now think they’re living in a horribly racist world. Like Bree Newsome, they are children of privileged who obviously have nothing better to do with their time. Or, like Newsome, they are using their ire to propel them into future political or artistic careers.

By doing this, we are losing sight of the very real problems in this country. Let’s start with Christian Reconstruction, Bill Gothard, Hobby Lobby, R. J. Rushdoony, Ron Paul, Gary North, and their connection to the John Birch Society, Koch Brothers, and the underbelly of the white supremacist movement. Add to this John Tanton’s anti-immigration movement, with its connection to the John Birch Society, and the underbelly of the white supremacist movement, and direct connections with the CofCC, American Renaissance, Stormfront, and various far right media personalities. They are the real problem. But – thanks to the insanity of the extreme left, ranting, railing, and acting like a bunch of fools over that stupid Confederate flag, these people – the real patrons of hate in this country, are getting a total and complete pass.

Do you now how many politicians these people control? Do you even comprehend their agenda? These are very, very bad people. They are men and women who slither around in the background. They are powerful, important, and hide their agenda behind layers of front organizations. Frankly, I think we should be afraid, we should be very afraid, especially when their manipulations and their money goes into promoting causes which inflame mentally ill loners like Dylann Root, and the people who have refused to see the big picture. Like tea partiers, they are content to be manipulated and used. The tea parties drove many people, myself included from the GOP. If the Dems aren’t careful, they are going to over-play their agenda and have the same thing happen to them.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/21/minimizing-hate/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/21/minimizing-hate/Where We’ve Gone Wronghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/IDwDl8PRJ2w/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/20/where-weve-gone-wrong/#commentsMon, 20 Jul 2015 10:36:06 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44174...Read the Rest]]>Our country has a terrible problem. It is weary, depressed, and heroes must be slaughtered. Nothing is good. Anything which once built up our nation is to be destroyed, denigrated, and manipulated to the point where we are miserable. The other evening I caught the tail end of the classic Captain from Castile. Tyrone Power was quite dashing, but I was always a sucker for Caesar Romero who played Cortez.

The minute I say ‘Hernando Cortez’ the snarling begins. He was a psychopath, evil, manipulative, destroying indigenous First Nation’s cultures, supplanting a lovely, spiritual culture based on human sacrifice, domination, and possible cannibalism with evil, horrid Christianity. Never mind the culture he destroyed was hated. Today, we must view the Christian culture which took its place as the root of all that is perverted. The same thing holds true with Junipero Serra and Pierre-Jean De Smet. Like Kit Carson, they were monsters. Only the native cultures were pure and holy. Much like defending Southern culture, anyone who does so is a racist, plain and simple.

Where did our world go so off-track that good men must be demonized so that other narratives supplant them? While we are doing this, we are destroying something quite beautiful about ourselves – our innocence. There is nothing wrong with innocence. It’s a good thing. We are not allowed to live in a Frank Capra world. Instead, if a person isn’t a specific minority, doesn’t know the right buzz words, or support the right cause there is something wrong with them.

I don’t mind admitting that I can be a pain on Twitter and when I go after liberals with comments to articles. The far right is annoyingly blindly stupid. People follow anyone who knows how to appeal to their basic sense of honor and decency. The far left is biased, cranky, self-righteous, self-serving, and nasty. If you don’t believe exactly what they want you to believe, say, and do, you are evil and must be destroyed. The irony is the very individuals who pretend to adore freedom are the very ones who are rapidly destroying it.

There’s a difference between innocence and stupidity. There’s nothing wrong with being innocent, and looking at the best in people. I’m tired of our society and culture shooting the feet of clay out from under people and legends which aren’t perfect, but don’t deserve to be destroyed because certain groups of individuals, no matter race, religion, or education, can’t get a grip on their own lives and realize that everyone has a right to be who and what they want to be.

What has truly dismayed me is the way the same individuals who went hyper-active when a seriously disturbed young man slaughtered nine decent men and women in Charleston are acting when a seriously disturbed young men slaughtered five American Heroes in Tennessee. Don’t all lives matter? Evidently not. It now looks like certain factions used the hatred of one seriously disturbed monster to attempt to destroy an entire segment of the country. Yet, these same individuals don’t dare condemn anyone who is Islamic. It might generate hatred among the segment of the country they already detest.

I think we need to seriously look in the mirror and get a grip on our lives. If not, we’re going to destroy the very essence of what has made this nation great, if we haven’t already destroyed it. The problem is what is the ‘truth’ about our nation and how we approach our history?

“…Truth is most often used to mean being in accord with fact or reality,or fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal.

The commonly understood opposite of truth is falsehood, which, correspondingly, can also take on a logical, factual, or ethical meaning. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in several contexts, including philosophy and religion. Many human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most (but not all) of the sciences, law, and everyday life.

Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians.Language and words are a means by which humans convey information to one another and the method used to determine what is a “truth” is termed a criterion of truth. There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth: what things are truthbearers capable of being true or false; how to define and identify truth; the roles that faith-based and empirically based knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective or objective, relative or absolute…”

We need to get back to cold, hard facts. When we do, we discover we’re good people, throwing away who we are, for a ‘greater truth’ that we are monsters because of the past, when nothing can be farther from verifiable fact.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/20/where-weve-gone-wrong/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/20/where-weve-gone-wrong/Sunday Morning Opera: Tosca, I Need Toscahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/mYl9My8WfaM/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/19/sunday-morning-opera-tosca-i-need-tosca/#commentsSun, 19 Jul 2015 10:30:10 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44187...Read the Rest]]>Tosca is my very favorite opera. I’m a junkie. Let’s be honest here, the greatest Scarpia ever is Sherrill Milnes, then again he’s also now finally considered one of the greatest Giovanni’s ever. Years ago, he did a recording of Tosca with Placido Domingo and Leontyne Price. I love her Tosca. I think she may be the best Tosca.

I don’t like today’s productions of Tosca. It is a no brainer. It is based on historical fact, basically an eighteen hour period on June 17 & 18, 1800. Because we know the date and the location, costumes should be quite simple.

“…In May 1800 Napoleon, by then the undisputed leader of France, brought his troops across the Alps to Italy once again. On 14 June his army met the Austrian forces at the Battle of Marengo (near Alessandria). Austrian troops were initially successful; by mid-morning they were in control of the field of battle. Their commander, Michael von Melas, sent this news south towards Rome. However, fresh French troops arrived in late afternoon, and Napoleon attacked the tired Austrians. As Melas retreated in disarray with the remains of his army, he sent a second courier south with the revised message. The Neapolitans abandoned Rome, and the city spent the next fourteen years under French domination…”

This 1976 film version is considered one of the best versions, ever. If you want to have some fun, watch the Met’s recent version of Il Trovatore right after Tosca. I love the way the new version places the story during the war in Portugal during the same time frame. Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s de Luna is the perfect sequel, especially the meltdown, and costuming to reflect the meltdown. And – please keep him in your prayers. There are some positive rumors, but they are just that – rumors.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/19/sunday-morning-opera-tosca-i-need-tosca/feed/5http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/19/sunday-morning-opera-tosca-i-need-tosca/The Foul Staunch of Rank Hypocrisyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/wzvQR-xeHpQ/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/18/the-foul-staunch-of-rank-hypocrisy/#commentsSat, 18 Jul 2015 10:39:58 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44179...Read the Rest]]>Did you know that military recruiting centers have been major targets of Islamic terror for years? Did you know how frequent Islamic terror related arrests are in the US? Islamic extremist arrests here in the US are growing in number?

Evidently the lives of Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Sullivan, Lance Cpl. Skip ‘Squire’ Wells, Sgt. Carson Holmquist, and Staff Sgt. David Wyatt don’t matter, at least not in the grand scheme of all things hysterical and extremely progressive. For one thing, and I am loath to say this, but I am going to come right out and do it, they are the members of the wrong group murdered by someone from a protected ethnic group. Apparently, when one is dealing with politically correct sensibilities, there are certain groups of people who are not acceptable and must be destroyed at all costs. I don’t know how else to put it. They are to be attacked and harassed by unbiased individuals who are only bigots when it comes to interacting with those specific groups.

In other words, if a person is white, Southern, conservative, and Christian they are automatically considered to be racist haters who must be marginalized as quickly as possible. The groups doing the hating are allegedly unbiased and quite fair. They loath racists and anyone resembling one. They don’t hate – unless you are white, Southern, and Christian. They don’t hate unless you are white and Southern. They don’t hate unless you are Southern and Christian. They don’t hate unless you are Christian. They don’t hate if you are white, atheist, and Southern. You can be white, atheist, and liberal. You can be white, atheist, liberal, and Southern – sort of. It helps if yo are not Southern. Right now, their manipulative, political overlords are demanding they hate anything Southern. Beware if you encounter them online. They are rude. They are bullies, and abusers. They marginalize, and basically do everything possible to silence the opposition.

I like following trends, to see how people think and react. As someone who spent 4 decades of my life in South Carolina, I was sickened and heart-broken over what happened in Charleston. I was and still am furious with the irrational hatred I am still seeing when it comes to the South. I don’t get it. None of this makes sense, especially when one listens to the overwhelming sounds of silence when it comes to dealing with what happened in Chattanooga on Thursday. They are totally and completely silent, except for discussing the abject hatred and racism of the South, and how to basically destroy it.

Part of it is about silencing anyone who dares oppose what the select have to say. I’ve been leaving comments on sites, some of them liberal, designed to see what would happen if I dared express a contrary opinion. What they do is nothing less than mean, cruel, vicious bullying. It is strange. To express a contrary opinion is to be bullied into submission.

The far right is rough. Libertarians are a nightmare from hell, but what I’m learning about the extreme left is shocking. I spent an hour following my Twitter feed, checking out liberals. Not one single person tweeted about what happened in Chattanooga, yet they are still talking about racism, and the deaths of others, but not one single peep about the death of four Marines.

Why?

We are all well aware that the followers of the Muslim faith are, for the most part, like everyone else. There are good people and bad. They are no different than others. Yet, groups like the SPLC have no problem listing some Christian groups as ‘hate’ groups, and rightly so. Yet, they don’t do the same for certain Islamic organizations we know are up to no good. We’re told that ‘Christian’ hate groups are more dangerous than Islam. For some strange reason the SPLC discusses lone wolf domestic terror as far right, white, male, and white supremacist. The ADL, on the other hand, points to an Islamic connection.

Psychology Today

There is a far right connection to extremism. I’ve been writing about it for years. And, if I were a cop, I’d be more concerned about the far right than I would Islamic terror for a simple reason. Apparently the feds are doing a decent job catching those involved in Islamic terror, and aren’t with the far right. Can you say racial profiling? The real problem here is that the Obama Administration is refusing to deal with Islamic terror.

“…The President, referring to three Muslims killed in North Carolina, said that no one should be targeted because of his or her faith. I agree, but it does happen. It is curious that the President used this specific example to blame religious targeting as the facts of the case are not clear and this may have been due to a parking space dispute. However, when there is undeniable evidence of Jews being targeted and killed in a Kosher butcher store or a synagogue or 21 Christians killed for being Christians in Syria, the administration avoids accusations and refers to them as “citizens” and “innocents.” When radical violent Muslims target and kill Christians, we need to acknowledge that it was religiously motivated. Losing sight of the groups’ purpose and ideology inhibits rallying recruitments from a moral perspective….”

What is so amazing about this paragraph is that I’ve spent about 4 hours working on this post, trying to find the above information. There is a tremendous amount of material out there about far right extremism, but I had to find the above on the Psychology Today site.

Why?

When I started this article, it was about the hypocrisy of liberals, race, terror, and bias. It went in a direction I never expected. I never expected to find material that backed up my suspicion that the Obama Administration is trying to downplay Islamic terror, even in the US, by manipulating numbers to make it appear far right, white, conservatives are the real danger.

Why?

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/18/the-foul-staunch-of-rank-hypocrisy/feed/2http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/18/the-foul-staunch-of-rank-hypocrisy/Trumpedhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/63Gji2nnmMs/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/17/trumped/#commentsFri, 17 Jul 2015 10:34:17 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44165...Read the Rest]]>First, I a not endorsing Donald Trump. I am not supporting him. I’m supporting my friend, Lindsey. I would vote for Trump under one, maybe two circumstances, first Bernie Sanders being the Dem nominee, and maybe if Hillary were. I’m on again and off again with her. That’s it. My choice is Lindsey Graham. So, do not consider this an endorsement of Trump. My choice, if Lindsey isn’t in it, if Joe Biden. I’m crazy about him!

Frankly, I’m enjoying the Donald Show. I don’t think he’s hurting the GOP. First, he’s giving it some much needed levity, and it needs some levity. Second, he is sucking all the air out of the room. That’s not exactly a bad thing. Like I said, I’m supporting Lindsey, and he’s not hurting Lindsey, at all. He’s almost the perfect foil for Lindsey. Over the years, Lindsey has been the one consistent GOP voice in the room when it comes to immigration reform. Lindsey is getting air time, and is coming out looking like the statesman that he is. So, let’s let the Donald Show continue. He’s hurting Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and the also-rans, who cannot get air time. He could be hurting Jeb Bush worst of all. He’s not hurting Lindsey, so let Donald be Donald.

He is saying things which need to be said. I don’t approve of half of it, but they need to be said. We have a crime problem on the Southern border, no matter how the press tries to portray it. Mexico is horribly corrupt. How corrupt is it? Personally, I sold my 1988 LeBaron Series B Convertible, which was almost mint to a jerk who paid me $27.00 for it. He never called me back about getting together with him to transfer the title. Long story short, the car is now in El Paso, if not Mexico. I talked to a local magistrate on Wednesday. Because he took it across the border, and bought a fake title in Mexico, I am totally screwed. That’s life on the border.

Unfortunately, he is speaking to a strong anti-immigration faction within the GOP. I still don’t get that one. When people claim to be Christians, then they need to do the whole stranger in an strange land, and the least of them. Unfortunately, the issue has been so manipulated by the Tanton hate machine, we’re not going to see any form of positive immigration reform. I don’t know about you, but the realization that 80% of them women crossing from Central America through Mexico to this country are raped, and know they will be is horrifying. Yet, they keep coming – for a better life. I think we need to be honoring that.

The media is treating Trump like dirt. I think the worst the media treats him, the more he resonates with people. Perhaps people are sick and tired of politicians. That’s what you are hearing from his supporters. They’re just tired of politicians. They want a business person in office. If we pay attention to the lesson of history, the front-runner status won’t last much longer. But – what if it does?

I keep thinking the media is protesting too much. There’s something, somewhere, in some internal polling that terrifies them. This could get interesting.

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/17/trumped/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/17/trumped/Stone Mountain, Revisionism ,Hoop Skirts & Dealing with the Wretchedly Ignoranthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/3B29oP0uYpI/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/15/stone-mountain-revisionism-hoop-skirts-dealing-with-the-wretchedly-ignorant/#commentsWed, 15 Jul 2015 10:30:34 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44158...Read the Rest]]>Just when you think the anti-Southern hysteria could get any dumber, well, it has. Now the NAACP in Atlanta wants the sculptures on Stone Mountain destroyed. That’s nice, but there is a geological reality that is tied into the Southeastern Tennessee Seismic Zone, which could be almost as deadly as New Madrid. The carvings on Stone Mountain were begun by the same person who went on to do Mount Rushmore. At one time it was a big fat hairy deal. Contrary to the detractors, it was quite a feat of engineering. It was a very dangerous project. People died creating it. It is art. It is monumental art. You don’t destroy monumental art, no matter how repulsive it might be to you.

Quakes GA Tech

I find idiots who think you can just dynamite Stone Mountain to be absurd and also ignorant wretches. For the ill-informed, Stone Mountain is one of the largest granite uplifts on the planet. You start trying to destroy the mountain, which is huge, and you can set off earthquakes the same way fracking is setting them off in Oklahoma. If recent studies are correct and there is a correlation with metasediment, then explosions are not going to be optimal. All you need to do is note that seismic activity already occurs in the region near Stone Mountain to know that anything that would actually remove the sculptures could cause a serious earthquake. In other words, I gather geology and earthquakes are racist, right?

“…Stone Mountain is a pluton, a type of igneous intrusion. Primarily composed of quartz monzonite, the dome of Stone Mountain was formed during the formation of the Blue Ridge Mountains around 300-350 million years ago (during the Carboniferous period), part of the Appalachian Mountains. It formed as a result of the upwelling of magma from within the Earth’s crust. This magma solidified to form granite within the crust five to ten miles below the surface.

Stone Mountain pluton continues underground 9 miles (14 km) at its longest point into Gwinnett County. Numerous reference books and Georgia literature have dubbed Stone Mountain as “the largest exposed piece of granite in the world”. This misnomer is most likely a result of advertisement by granite companies and early park administration. Stone Mountain, though often called a pink granite dome, actually ranges in composition from quartz monzonite to granite and granodiorite.

The minerals within the rock include quartz, plagioclase feldspar, microcline and muscovite, with smaller amounts of biotite and tourmaline. The tourmaline is mostly black in color, and the majority of it exists as optically continuous skeletal crystals, but much larger, euhedral pegmatitic tourmaline crystals can also be found in the mountain’s numerous, cross-cutting felsic dikes. Embedded in the granite are xenoliths or pieces of foreign rocks entrained in the magma.

The granite intruded into the metamorphic rocks of the Piedmont region during the last stages of the Alleghenian Orogeny, which was the time when North America and North Africa collided. Over time, erosion eventually exposed the present mountain of more resistant igneous rock. This intrusion of granite also gave rise to Panola Mountain and Arabia Mountain, both in DeKalb County, smaller outcroppings further east of Stone Mountain…”

When you are dealing with geological forces, and something so massive, only a fool would attempt to do damage to it. It is artistically important, contrary to what fake-racists want us to think. The cure would be far worse than the so-called disease.

I am fully expecting these same anti-racists to come up with the grand idea of banning all hoop skirts since they were worn in Gone With the Wind. Technically, they were called cage crinolines. So much of what we’re hearing today is uneducated hyperbole. That’s okay. It’s all about the hate – their hate. Frankly, I’ve never seen so much of it spewed against people in this nation the way I am seeing the hatred against those of us from the South. It’s quite acceptable. Apparently we’re to pay for what happened during the era of slavery, even if our ancestors weren’t part of it. Just being from the South is enough to taint a person.

As far as the history of the cage crinoline skirt, well…. it’s in my book.

When I was a kid, in school, we would order paperback books that cost a small amount. Let’s face it, my parents should have known, by the time I was in the fifth grade that I had a problem. I always ordered more books than anyone else in the class. One of my favorites was called the Search for Planet X. The tale about how Clyde Tombaugh’s obsession led to the discovery of Planet X, or Pluto is one of the most important reads of my childhood. I already loved science, some of my earliest memories being the pre-Mercury launches, and going outside with my grandmother Froehlich, who was astronaut-happy, to see if we could get a glimpse of anything. (Later, when I worked as a lobbyist with NASA, my grandmother became infamous for being astronaut happy, acquiring her own astronaut fans).

Clyde Tombaugh‘s tale is one which excited my imagination. It probably didn’t hurt that, while I was reading it, I discovered a pathetic little television show no one was watching, thus sealing my fate, forever. You give a kid good science that is easy to read, and very good science fiction like Star Trek, and well, unfortunately, you get moi. I suppose that’s why this day is almost magical for me.

Year later, when I was all grown up (allegedly) and working on a project, I became friends with an co-authors with one of the scientists who envisioned a new kind of space probe. Anticipating the fact that NASA was going to need to do planetary exploration on the ‘cheap’ they decided to propose an entire program of ‘cheap & dirty’ probes which would not be as glamorous as the Voyager series but would yield as much information. They knew, even then, it would take at least 35-40 years for their vision to yield results. I guess that’s what I’m thinking about while I write this.

“…”I’m delighted at this latest accomplishment by NASA, another first that demonstrates once again how the United States leads the world in space,” said John Holdren, assistant to the President for Science and Technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple missions orbiting and exploring the surface of Mars in advance of human visits still to come; the remarkable Kepler mission to identify Earth-like planets around stars other than our own; and the DSCOVR satellite that soon will be beaming back images of the whole Earth in near real-time from a vantage point a million miles away. As New Horizons completes its flyby of Pluto and continues deeper into the Kuiper Belt, NASA’s multifaceted journey of discovery continues.”

“The exploration of Pluto and its moons by New Horizons represents the capstone event to 50 years of planetary exploration by NASA and the United States,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “Once again we have achieved a historic first. The United States is the first nation to reach Pluto, and with this mission has completed the initial survey of our solar system, a remarkable accomplishment that no other nation can match.”…”

New Horizons is the product of decades of dreams. Probes like this have made planetary exploration sexy again – if for one brief shining moment. Even today, after the Obama Administration has done everything possible to enable commercial space flight, much to the detriment of NASA, 58% of the American people think it is essential for us to be a leader in space exploration. Thanks to the Obama Administration and liberal Democrats, we no longer are.

We really don’t have that many reasons these days to wave our American flags. Our nation is in decline thanks to the extremes of both liberal, conservative, and libertarian policies. Patriotism is a joke. If you say something good about this nation, it must be predicated with how bad people are, how racist and bigoted we are, and how lacking in compassion.

We don’t have much reason to wave our flags. Our military, Department of Defense is openly training Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. John Kerry just made what could be a disastrous deal with Iran. Our country is a miserable place to live with poverty and despair on the rise. Our once active space program gave our nation pride and a sense of the future. The Obama Administration has effectively killed it.

Thank heavens for planetary exploration!

]]>http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/15/the-most-important-news-of-the-day-clyde-tombaugh/feed/0http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/15/the-most-important-news-of-the-day-clyde-tombaugh/People Like Bree Newsomehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePinkFlamingo/~3/s1rn3NCDDcI/
http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/2015/07/14/people-like-bree-newsome/#commentsTue, 14 Jul 2015 10:35:58 +0000http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/?p=44146...Read the Rest]]>Let’s be very honest. I don’t like people like Bree Newsome. Fact is, I can’t stand people like Bree Newsome. She’s a self-serving, narcissistic, self-promoting individual who is using an issue to put herself in the spotlight, stomping over other people to get there. I thought this before I located her website. Durn, am I right. Yesterday, I wrote that she was obviously not oppressed. Once I checked her bio, I’m 100% correct. She is a child of privilege, using and manipulating a situation to get ahead – for herself. She is now a celebrity, with all the perks of the game. That’s been her plan, all along. She’s not just the 1%, she’s the 0.5%, born with a platinum spoon in her mouth, and then pontificates about oppression of ‘her people’. Unfortunately, ‘her people’ are Hollywood, Upper East Side, Peabody Institute, that sort of thing.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with self-promotion, to a point. I’ve known people like Newsome, unfortunately. They have a tendency to rush in, very coldly and calculating, co-opting an issue, a subject, a cause, or even a group, club, to make it their own special little stepping-stone to bigger and better.

You see it a heck of a lot in politics, and I have the footprints on my back to prove it. It is a funny thing, though. People who climb over others to promote themselves usually end up tripping over their own big feet.

People like this are found in all aspects of life, unfortunately. You encounter them in school, at work, at church, and especially in civic organizations. Boy, do you find them in civic organizations. Talk about users, that’s where they can truly do a heck of a lot of damage. The are people who so literally rig things in clubs, you don’t have much of a chance, unless you are in their little inner circle. The DAR is worse than any of them, been there and done that.

So, when I saw Bree Newsome, I knew exactly what she was. Don’t go telling me what a great activist she is. The only reason she’s activated is to promote Bree Newsome into another self-congratulatory film award.